as will be suggested to you, give me the very greatest pleasure, and astonish me in two ways ... by the versification, mechanically considered; and by the successful evolution of pure beauty from all that roughness and rudeness of the sin of the boar-pinner—­successfully evolved, without softening one hoarse accent of his voice.  But there is to be a pause now—­you will not write any more—­no, nor come here on Wednesday, if coming into the roar of this London should make the pain worse, as I cannot help thinking it must—­and you were not well yesterday morning, you admitted.  You will take care?  And if there should be a wisdom in going away...!

Was it very wrong of me, doing what I told you of yesterday?  Very imprudent, I am afraid—­but I never knew how to be prudent—­and then, there is not a sharing of responsibility in any sort of imaginable measure; but a mere going away of so many thoughts, apart from the thinker, or of words, apart from the speaker, ... just as I might give away a pocket-handkerchief to be newly marked and mine no longer.  I did not do—­and would not have done, ... one of those papers singly.  It would have been unbecoming of me in every way.  It was simply a writing of notes ... of slips of paper ... now on one subject, and now on another ... which were thrown into the great cauldron and boiled up with other matter, and re-translated from my idiom where there seemed a need for it.  And I am not much afraid of being ever guessed at—­except by those Oedipuses who astounded me once for a moment and were after all, I hope, baffled by the Sphinx—­or ever betrayed; because besides the black Stygian oaths and indubitable honour of the editor, he has some interest, even as I have the greatest, in being silent and secret.  And nothing is mine ... if something is of me ... or from me, rather.  Yet it was wrong and foolish, I see plainly—­wrong in all but the motives.  How dreadful to write against time, and with a side-ways running conscience!  And then the literature of the day was wider than his knowledge, all round!  And the booksellers were barking distraction on every side!—­I had some of the mottos to find too!  But the paper relating to you I never was consulted about—­or in one particular way it would have been better,—­as easily it might have been.  May God bless you, my dear friend,

E.B.B.

R.B. to E.B.B.

Friday Morning.
[Post-mark, July 25, 1845.]

You would let me now, I dare say, call myself grateful to you—­yet such is my jealousy in these matters—­so do I hate the material when it puts down, (or tries) the immaterial in the offices of friendship; that I could almost tell you I was not grateful, and try if that way I could make you see the substantiality of those other favours you refuse to recognise, and reality of the other gratitude you will not admit.  But truth is truth, and you are all generosity, and will draw none but